The experience of trauma is often felt as a total shattering of previously held assumptions that profoundly disrupt an individual's social and cultural environment. Utilising the creativity of art to facilitate the cathartic expression of the experience of distress, the visual arts hold, facilitate and activate the processes of healing. 

These processes are needed to repair an individual's social and cultural landscape, reconnecting them through emotive content towards recovery and regrowth.

The Institute of Mental health's summer exhibtion showcases the work of 42 artists with and without a lived experience of mental distress. Through the exhibition's theme of "Traumascapes and landscapes of the interior", these artists share with us what is increasingly and usefully being understood and acknowledged as a normal and natural reaction of the experience of coming to awareness and acceptance of one's interior landscape.

For more information about our "Traumascapes and landscapes of the interior" exhibition, please visit our Arts at the Institute pages.